Forrester Research has produced: ‘Dynamic Case Management- An old-idea catches fire.’ He does teleconferences with AIIM on ‘Support Your Information Workers by Understanding and Implementing Case Management’ or Forresters own TCs as well. Forrester lists ActionBase, Appian, Cordys, EMC, Global 360, IBM, Pallas Athena, Pegasystems, Singularity and … whoa … even CRM maven Sword Ciboodle as their entrants for the next DCM Wave. The likes of Fujitsu, HandySoft, Ideate, OpenText, and Oracle (!!!) will only make it into the ‘Ripple’. Us and Whitestein Technologies are also listed in that second group, but we are the only ones who actually provide GOAL-oriented processes! There are vendors with products that have to be integrated, others who are simple application tools, email-collaborators, but hardly anyone who does embedded content. But then OpenText is jumping now on the ACM bandwagon and promotes ECM as case management. Virtually every BPM vendor now wants a piece of this DCM market especially as the frustration about hyped-up benefits claims of BPM sets in. Read about Dr. Rashid Khan’s assessment of BPM Simulation and Optimization that is a perfect add-on to my own perspective on the problems with flowcharts.

Gartner Group has another, long-term view to offer that includes Social Media and how work will change in the next ten years. I covered it in this post about ‘The De-routinization of Work.’ Makes you wonder why anyone still bothers with BPM in the first place.

So BPM claims to be agile and now case management claims to be dynamic, goal-oriented, adaptive and more! How can a normal IT person figure out what to do? The best way is to actually do a proof of concept installation. The focus must be on how flexible a system is in terms of integration into your environment and how the business users can work with the solution to create proceses and case work with all resources (data, content, rules, tasks, GUI) themselves! That is the whole trick!

I need to point out that what Forrester defines as DYNAMIC case management is by far not yet ADAPTIVE. Forrester defines dynamic case management to be semi-structured and collaborative, dynamic, human-centered, information-intensive processes undertaken around a given context, while being driven by events, requiring incremental and progressive responses. So what is different about ADAPTIVE Case Management? The key point is not just runtime dynamic changes, but Just-In-Time creation of the process and resources WITH embedded learning, which means that knowledge of a previous case can be autmatically used by people in a later case or process! As a further point Forrester does not use the term knowledge worker but rather (information-) I-worker, which is anyone who uses a computer at his job. I see ACM mostly for knowledge workers who apply their specific skill for case resolution or process execution. Craig also now points to the link between business architecture, strategic objectives and operational metrics that I have been talking about for some time.

Maybe the follwoing video will make the difference between dynamic and ADAPTIVE clearer:

I also propose that ACM has to deal not only with goals but with complex, captured content, dynamic embedded content, user definable business rules and is mostly event driven, but these are Complex Business Events. I recently posted my view on how BPMN and rules relate to CBE.

Verify if BPM or case management product supports unpredictable (semi-structured) processes with complex events in an ADAPTIVE manner by means of the following:

Does the system enable the definition or reuse of a business and process architecture to provide the base infrastructure for business driven process creation based on strategic objectives and operational metrics?

Does the modeling capability allow direct linkage of objectives, metrics to the process goals and business data in the process/case and therefore embedded verification of goal fulfillement?

Can properly authorized business users assemble the process/case from data objects, inbound and outbound business (with mapped data) content, user-defined rules, and GUI components (widgets?) without needing to be BPMN or flowchart experts and execute and modify at will?

Can unexpected events or data be handled by means of new tasks, rules, performers and goals being added to the existing process to handle them without causing disruptive exceptions ?

Can the signatures of unexpected events be auto-discovered and linked to the context patterns?

Does the CBE capability identify fuzzy patterns of similarity between events and suggests goals, tasks or actions to handle them?

Are business user decisions related to events fed back into the CBE pattern matching mechanism?

Can new performers be added into the case/process at any time and existing or newly defined tasks with associated resources be assigned to them in a social media like, but fully secure collaboration?

Can ‘expert’ case participants be selected manually from a skills profile or will the system recommend exeperts based on an automatic match between case and skill or due to past selection by other participants?

Can goals, milestones, SLA values and rules be embedded by the business user to verify compliance, efficiency and cost and take direct influence on the execution/routing/modification of the process?

Can the business user created processes, goals or milestones be saved at the end of the execution as new templates into the repository (with all resource templates)?

Can business users write rules in natural language (no technical syntax) with automatic verification of rule syntax and validity by data object and content mapping based on the business architecture?

Are all resources for content (capture and creation), process, rule and GUI are version controlled through a single dev/test/deploy/suspend mechanism? Does this ensure that the maintenance meta-processes for resource templates are decoupled from execution?

If you want to know how ACM can put your organization on the track to business innovation then contact us for a demonstration in which we will build the processes that are relevant to you as we demo.

6 thoughts on “The ISIS Papyrus ACM Vision Statement”

The ISIS Papyrus Platform also provides an Information Workplace, Social Media capability and process management. That power can clearly be understood as a daunting complexity by those with a small mind. We have recently installed a consolidated, ready-to-use capture-, process-, content-, and case-management setup for an insurance in TWO DAYS. Yes, that still requires to define SOA and other interfaces to map to their data and user information. It still requires to define the content, the business rules, the business processes (not the simple admin life-cycle), and the data interfaces. It has to support their business needs! To present this as a drawback is simply ignorant.

thank you for reading and commenting. This post is a response to a competitor document who directly attacked our ability for customization without needing programming as complexity and drawback. It was in the context of simple letter applications. In all cases it is necessary to map the business data through a data interface (i.e. SOA), create the necessary data models, map them into the documents, set up the admin processes authorizations, create the Printpool and printing setup and test it for production. Most competitors claim that they can do all that out-of-the-box, which is nonsense. We can install out-of-the-box as we have shown, but then you don’t have anything linked to the customer environment. I am willing to go into any functional head-to-head comparison by an independent analyst and I have suggested this to many vendors over the years and it was always declined, as they typically have only 30% of ISIS Papyrus functionality. This one vendor says for example that it is REALLY important that their product is built on Java, because it is something that the customer’s staff know. If their product would not need any customization then this would be irrelevant. So it clearly means that with such a product all customization happens by means of programming. That means that there is no versioning, no deployment and no independence of function and GUI as with Papyrus. Papyrus is a MODEL-DRVEN design and therefore there are only models and rules that can be much easier changed. Yes, one can use our PQL to write fairly complex scripts, but that is simply there so that there is no limitation when customers request functionality beyond the ‘out-of-the-box’ setup.

Additionaly there is the issue of consolidation. The Papyrus functionality can be used standalone, but in most cases it is used to integrate many functionalities of process, content and case management! In December we installed for a German insurance client an ACM setup for an innovation project and we took two days to prepare it and make it usable. Clearly that only inluded a sample process and a basic role/autority setup and used our sample data. It needs to be defined from there.

So my annnoyance is about a COMPETITOR who uses this information about our product out of context for marketing purposes. It is either intentionally false or ignorant for a COMPETITOR to say that the flexibility and power to integrate is a drawback of our product because it needs work. Yes, it does. IN terms of our CUSTOMERS we take the needs and requirements for more intuitive user interfaces and simpler setup and even more ‘out-of-the-box’ capability VERY seriously. But even our standard case manaement capability has to changed if the customer wants to work in a different manner and it can be done very simply. It is impossible with another product as it is not MODELLED. Using the versioning capability of the Papyrus Platform we can roll out and integrate enhancements that we provide in our frameworks in a simple manner compared to what happens when this customer has to customize by means of Java.

Thanks again for reading and commenting. It is highly appreciated! Regards, Max Pucher